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BRIEF COMMUNICATION: A physiological evaluation of the efficacy of pain-mitigation strategies for cautery-disbudded goat kids

Abstract

Cautery disbudding is a painful procedure commonly
performed on-farm to destroy the horn bud cells of goat kids
to prevent horn growth. Disbudding is performed because
horns can injure pen mates and stock people. Globally,
standard practice of disbudding typically excludes the use
of pain-mitigation and there are few studies investigating
kid responses to disbudding and different pain-mitigation
strategies. To date, pain-mitigation strategies used when
disbudding kids include administration of non-steroidal
anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), local anaesthesia
(LA) and general anaesthesia (GA). Meloxicam (NSAID)
reduced pain-related responses in cautery-disbudded kids
(Ingvast-Larsson et al. 2011). Local anaesthetics (e.g.,
lignocaine), however, have not shown to be affective at
reducing the pain response following disbudding (Alvarez
et al. 2015). General anaesthesia has been used in kids,
but its effect on pain-related responses was not assessed
(Ingvast-Larsson et al. 2011). The objective of this study
was to evaluate the physiological response to different painmitigation
strategies for cautery-disbudding in goat kids.

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For over seventy years the New Zealand Society of Animal Production has played an important role as a forum fostering research in all areas of animal production including production systems, nutrition, meat science, animal welfare, wool science, animal breeding and genetics.